She spun, snatching a rock from the ground since she hadn’t been able to find the gun she’d dropped.

“Stop! It’s me!”

Eric Ivers had prudently chosen to put a solid five feet between them before calling out. Now he crawled up next to her. “What the hell’s wrong with you? I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last five minutes.”

She pointed to her ear and he nodded his understanding.

“You okay?” he said, bringing his mouth close to the side of her head in order to be heard.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’ve been better but I’m still breathing.”

“Have you ever seen anything like those things?”

“I’ve never even heard of anything like those things.”

“Why aren’t we dead?”

“I think I can answer that,” he said. “I rolled about halfway down the canyon and when I stopped, one of those goddamn things had me dead to rights. Nothing I could do, so I just laid there. Then the contrail disappeared and it started to lose altitude.”

“It ran out of gas?”

“That’s what it looked like to me.”

“Did you pick it up? Do you have it?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” he said, pointing down. The projectile was lodged in his shin.

“Shit,” Randi said. “Can we get it out?”

“I tried. It’s barbed. The goddamn Japanese think of everything.”

“Okay. You wait here,” Randi said. “Let me go scope things out.”

“Fuck that.”

She’d anticipated his response and wasn’t prepared to argue. His wife was up there and she wasn’t responding to the radio.

Randi crept forward with Ivers right behind. Normal tactics seemed pointless—there was no way to provide each other cover from those things. Better to stay close and maybe one of them could draw fire while the other went for another ride down the canyon.

She came over the crest in first position and still there was nothing but empty wilderness. They angled left, stopping every few seconds for Ivers to listen for the telltale hiss of the projectiles’ engines.

Finally they came upon the digger and Randi felt the breath catch in her chest.

She’d lost people before. More than she wanted to remember. The difference was that they were all pros who had signed on of their own free will. This was very different.

She stood straight and walked toward the shredded bodies of Wilson and his students. Not a single one was even worth crouching down and checking for a pulse. Their dead eyes stared accusingly at her, and the weight of those stares left her bracing herself against the blood-spattered tunneling machine.